For a lot of us kids growing up in the Southern California suburbs, as did Zack de la Rocha himself, Rage Against The Machine was our first exposure to those kind of politicized messages pointing out the inherent racism and oppressiveness of much of American society, certainly of its government and police forces. Later on as we grew up we learned to intellectualize this and understand those criticisms more completely, but Rage was our "gateway drug" to radicalism. Sold to us, of course, by Epic Records.

One could point to other contemporaneous music with similar messages, such as the entirety of N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton album, but 1) I was a bit younger when that came out, and 2) most suburban whites experienced that music basically as minstrelsy, an amusing caricature of black life. Only later did the truth become clearer.

And the world will live as one